Instapundit asks the question “What’s love got to do with it?”…sorry…”What’s so bad about income inequality?” in a TCS column yesterday.

He seems to drift a bit as he makes his points, but I’ll take that as exploring-out-loud. Here’s what he says:

If we’re all getting richer, why is it bad for the richest to be getting richer faster?
He replies that a) some may argue that it’s unaesthetic; b) it places – at the end of a long term of wealth concentration – civil society at some risk; and c) he makes the case for B) by pointing to George Soros and suggesting that increased concentrations of wealth could create a situation where

the imbalance in political power between the super-rich and the rest of us might become colossal. Of course, campaign finance reform might conceivably land Soros in jail, but the point still holds: if the super-rich become rich enough, they’ll become laws unto themselves. And if that happens, it doesn’t matter that the rest of us are getting richer, too.

I’ll agree, suggest that we’re already seeing that to a great extent, and further, that what we’re already seeing is having serious negative consequences on civil society.

I’ve defended redistribution in the past

There is a critical level of diffusion of power that has made the American model work. Not too diffuse, for there we get the demos, and ultimately the mob; and not too concentrated, for there we begin to stratify as those with privilege erect barriers to make sure that they can keep it.

My biggest concern is that we are near a tipping point where that delicate balance will be at risk. I, and others like me, want to shove the pendulum back the other way.

Glenn thinks that the tipping point is in the far future. I don’t; I think that the kind of isolation and stratification that we’re talking about is here, now, and that the values of those who would toss out equality as a social good and replace it entirely with a reified hierarchy of power and wealth frighten me.

…I’ll also suggest that there is also an even more significant distinction between a society that holds equality – any kind of equality – as a foundational belief, and one that does not. I used Dickens’ England as an example of a class-driven society; one in which the accepted reality of inequality – in every form, political, legal, economic, and moral – is itself one of the organizing principles of the society. I could have used Elizabeth’s England, or the Persia of Cyrus, but there are more people that know Dickens – and the point is more clearly made by a society closer to us – than either of those.

Those are fundamentally different kinds of societies than those that hold equality as a value, regardless of what kind of equality is being discussed, and that difference ought to be obvious. If it isn’t, imagine for a moment a Persian artisan making an appeal to Cyrus or Darius based on their common humanity, and on some body of common rights. Having trouble?? No kidding…

The notion that people are equal in any way, and that societies should be organized on that principle was a revolutionary one, and one that we sadly take for granted. We shouldn’t.

Oliver Willis, as well as a few commenters are trying to “out” Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten as secret Bush operatives. I’m personally offended to have been left out, and am worried that when GWB is re-elected, my promised 2nd term ambassadorship to Grand Fenwick may not actually come through.

Actually, I am fairly pissed about this.

First, Jarvis criticizes MoveOn.org and their anti-Bush ad campaign (the one where they silently pulled the Bush=Hitler ad). And then, in the comments, he gets piled on for being ‘inadequately liberal’.

And that’s a pisser.

First, and foremost, it once again wraps up the smug ‘I know better than you’ that the Democratic Party has become associated with – and which lots of people, including me, find amazingly offensive.From commenter anne.elk (her handle):

At other times, when Jeff bravely stood by Jewish kids in France by stating how he would wear a kippah if it would only help them in their struggles against French anti-semitism, I tried to help Jeff understand how anti-semitism does exist in our own country, and encouraged him to wear a kippah to help our children. Again, to my dismay, Jeff did not respond to this invitation.

I know that within Jeff is a liberal heart, and a considerate man, and I only ask again for Jeff to make use of his pulpit to explore his own ideas and theories.

I try and help my seven year old understand how to do division. I try and help him understand adverbs. When I am talking to my older sons, we discuss things and I express my opinions and make arguments with the intent of convincing them, because I believe they are individual actors with moral and intellectual standing comparable to my own. That may be a subtle difference to some, but to me it is as clear as a summer’s day.

Willis – whose blog has the tagline ‘Like Kryptonite to Stupid’ takes the intellectually sophisticated tack that liberal interests are served by the following:

I call these two guys on their liberalism because I am very aware of the straw man of liberalism that gets an enormous amount of play in the media and blog world. I don’t expect people to toe the line with the Democratic Party, because I myself disagree with the DNC on quite a lot of issues. In their two cases, I find very little straying from the GOP line on any issue of merit. Even more so, I find that they both take every chance to bash liberals at the first blush – while giving the right a pass on practically everything. In contrast, I find folks like Alex Knapp and John Cole who are certainly more amenable to Team Bush even more critical of their “team” than Jarvis/Totten. I don’t know either of them much in real life (although my brief meeting with Jeff tells me that he’s wicked tall) so I look at their blogs and wonder how someone so orthodoxly in favor of the right can be considered a liberal. For Christ’s sake, even the WSJ editorial page disagrees with the Bushes every 1,000 years!

I look at the evidence, and call it as I see it.

Help me out here, Oliver – why does ‘calling someone out on their liberalism’ do anything at all to advance liberal causes? As opposed to, say burnishing your own self-image? I mean you’re not even taking issue with any specific thing that they say, except ‘Why do you pick on the liberals?’

And, sadly, the basis is right there – in his explanation that Alex Knapp and John Cole are ‘more critical’ of the Right than Jarvis or Totten.

Because, you doofus, Totten, and Jarvis, and I all care about liberal causes – real liberal causes like improving the lives of the less-well off, defending the environment in ways that actually accomplish something, and working to create a world politics that neither empowers the multinationals nor the kleptocrats. These values have been hijacked by the Bad Philosophers and the Nannies. This means that a) they are going to lose a lot of political power; and b) where they get political power, they will imitate the California State Legislature and do and spend lots while accomplishing very little.

I said it a long time ago, and I’ve never understood why people just won’t accept it:

“…I’ll comment that while my posts are pretty critical of the DNC establishment, they are critical with an eye toward creating an unassailable Democratic hegemony…so watch out!!”

We’ve been here before, of course. Remember POUM? And go read Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” to get a sense of what I’m talking about.

OK, finished the book on the flight back from Oakland.

Had a long talk with Biggest Guy today – he’s going back to UVA Saturday, and signing the ‘official’ ROTC papers – and somehow it tied too-neatly into my read of Halberstram’s book, ‘War In A Time Of Peace’.

Honest to God, I don’t map little personal stories to my blog topics deliberately. I don’t think that I’ll become a better blogger by channeling Lileks. I’m not sure whether it’s just that when I’m thinking about something, I tend to see it everywhere – so it manifests in my personal life – if there is some creepy Truman-show explanation, or if I just have the power to impose my will on reality – in which case I’ll be concentrating really hard in the future on my bank account and Uma Thurman…or maybe I ought to reverse that…

He and I were talking about Big Stuff to a college sophomore, identity and striving, and I started to explain to him about my view of contingency, of the complexity of human action, and I started to talk about Halberstram (which I’m giving him to show what decision making at the highest levels of the military is like).

First, let me echo my earlier comment, and say that this is a great book, and you should read it. After finishing it, I still think so, and in fact even more so.It’s good, to me, not only because it lays out much of the political and social dynamic that explains our current politics around Iraq, and because it serves as a convincing history of an important history in a way that manages to both show the context within wider history, and highlights important human truths that have application beyond what the book shows.

The most important, I deeply believe, is the – inexactitude – of human effort, especially in the political arenas. As we sit here and solve the world’s problems at our keyboards, things are clear, they are consistent, they are exact.

The world – the world of the crooked timber of humanity, which we inhabit – is one in which histories are written in blurry pencil, rather than with a ruler’s precision. Halberstram goes through one documentable, relatively simple and minor historic event…the decision by the Western powers to use military force in the former Yugoslavia…and demonstrates this.

I’ve marked about two dozen quotes, but in the interest of brevity, and hopefully convincing you to go get the book from the remainder stack or from the local library, I’ll just retype three:

One moment that had seemed to symbolize the supreme confidence of the Bush people during this remarkable chain of events. It came in mid-August of 1991, when some Russian right-wingers mounted a coup against Gorbachev and Bush held firm, first trying to support Gorbachev and, unable to reach him, then using his influence to help the embattled Boris Yeltsin. The coup had failed. A few days later, Gorbachev, restored to power in part because of the leverage of Washington, had resigned from the Communist Party. To the Bush people, that attempted coup had been a reminder that with the Cold War officially ended or not, the Berlin Wall up or down, the world was still a dangerous place, which meant the country would surely need and want an experienced leader, preferably a Republican, at the helm. Aboard Air Force One at that time, flying with his father from Washington back to the Bush family’s vacation home in Maine, was George W. Bush, the president’s son. he was just coming of age as a political operative in his own right, and he was euphoric about the meaning of these latest events. “Do you think the American people are going to turn to a Democrat now?” he asked.

…

[Journalist Roy] Gutman’s interview with Seselj left him with no doubt about Serb intentions. He filed his story on Seselj but felt that what he’d written was somehow hopelessly inadequate. The calm, understated nature of professional journalism had not been equal to the sheer horror of the deed and the threat. Something sinister was beginning to happen, with no restraints to limit the brutality.

…

Watching the intense byplay between those two [Albright and Cohen], Berger thought that one of the differences between Cohen and the activists in the administration like Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke, who was making occasional appearances at the principal’s meetings, was that Cohen had not experienced the terrible human wrenching of Balkans One, in which they had stumbled, failed, and agonized over three years before finally patching together a policy that worked. None of the more senior principals ever wanted to go through that again.

Do read the book.

I’ve been corresponding with Jim Hake, a local Los Angeles fella, who approached Joe about a plan he had to help the Marines perform the nation-building part of their role in Iraq by providing them with swag – toys and school supplies for children and basic medical supplies for Iraqi physicians.

He’s pulled it together (brilliantly), and now is ready to accept donations. You can donate cash here , or go here to see what kind of goods are being sought and how to get them to him. Time is of the essence, as he is working with the 1st Marine Division – who were in Baghdad and who are about to redeploy back to Iraq. The first container leaves in two weeks.

Many of us are safe at home, affected by the events in Iraq, and passionate in our feelings – one way or the other – about them. Here’s a chance to do some concrete good. For myself, I use the ‘good dinner’ metric in deciding how much to give; what does a good dinner out with Tenacious G cost me? For some, a good dinner out is Carl’s, as opposed to Mickey D’s. For some it’s Ginza Sushi-Ko (a wildly expensive sushi restaurant here in Los Angeles).

Obviously, I see this as a Good Thing, and for those of us in favor of the war – even for those opposed, who I am sure want the Iraqis to get a break, and for our troops to be able to do something other than ‘killing people and blowing shit up,’ as my Ranger friends put it.

I love this quote from the Maj. General Jim Mattis, the commander of the 1st Marine Division:

“While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resist, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime under Saddam’s oppression.”

It seems to me that this could be the motto we apply to many of our more militant interactions abroad.

A great, if slightly biased article in today’s New York Times Magazine about Democrats and foreign policy. The article, called The Things They Carry, by James Traub (echoing Tim O’Brien’s great book) is written from the perspective of a friendly critic, but a critic informed by history nonetheless.

He explains some of the historic roots of Democratic ambivalence toward the use of force, and talks about the thorny dilemma the party finds itself in today.

He talks at length with Dean:

When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ”I’m not betting on it, and I’m hoping against it, but there’s no indication that I should be expecting anything else.” What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein’s capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein’s apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats — and a considerable number of freshly polled voters — that the party hadn’t disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded.

and then lets Dean set out his strategy for confronting Bush:

Toward the end of our conversation, Dean said to me: ”The line of attack is not Iraq, though there’ll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, ‘What have you done to make us feel safer?’ I’m going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,” whom Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ”Our model is to get around the president’s right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.”

which is a most interesting strategy. I’ll suggest that Dean and I may well agree on homeland security, but probably differ on WMD and the Saudis.

I think that a defense strategy based solely on containing WMD and pre-WMD artifacts is a bad, brittle strategy; that the technology is – as all technologies do – moving down the learning curve, and that effective embargoes amount to putting reassembling shattered bottles and hoping the genie will climb back in. Clearly we need to do the easy things – buy up and secure the Soviet warheads, track the large-scale industrial complexes where components and weapons will be built. But as long as there are people who want to use them, we have to assume they eventually will get them, and so in parallel we need to reduce the number of people who want them.

Here his argument about the Saudis makes sense. But I’ll disagree with his priority. It is clear that Saudi money and influence are a big part of what we face in Islamist terror, and worse, permeate Washington, in both parties, at high levels. And we can only assume that Europe is similarly disposed. But I don’t even think that is the major obstacle to directly confronting the Saudis. It is simply that direct confrontation will lead to their collapse – and that our logical response – occupation – will provoke the Muslim-wide war I mean to avoid if possible. Here is a case where gentle pressure, patience and finesse – combined with some serious housecleaning on our part – seem like the logical paths. Which is a polite way of saying that in a year, the horse may learn to sing.

Traub puts the debate into historic perspective.

The Vietnam War spelled the end of cold-war liberalism. Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972 but lost to George McGovern, the leader of the peace wing, who had opposed almost all the weapons systems that Jackson supported. The battle inside the party continued with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, who divided his foreign-policy team between the dovish Vance and the hawkish Brzezinski; the contest reached its theatrical climax when Carter nominated Paul Warnke, a former McGovern adviser, as chief negotiator on the 1979 SALT II arms talks. Warnke had stated that he would be willing to make unilateral cuts to the American nuclear arsenal. Jackson, who opposed the negotiations altogether, used Senate hearings to depict the nominee as an enemy of military prepared-ness. He brought in witnesses from the Committee on the Present Danger, an assemblage of Democratic hawks, many of whom would soon be known as ”neoconservatives.”

The Democratic Party lost these hawks, and was soon moved to the sidelines on issues of security.

It remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact, spend the Soviets into the ground [A.L. note – hey, I said he was partisan…]. Nevertheless, the cold war ended on the Republicans’ watch, and so Reagan’s unyielding stance was given much of the credit for bringing it to a close. And while the G.O.P. emerged from that era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of fecklessness — a status brought home in the most mortifying possible manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank wearing a tanker’s helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

The collapse of the USSR left us as the world’s hyperpower, and gave us the luxury – as Halberstram describes Clinton – of being disinterested in foreign policy. It became a secondary arena for policymakers, and a place where a kind of cross-party, nonideological consensus could emerge.

There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration’s claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right — but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.

The fact that the Bush policy violates so many of the ‘institutional’ norms ought to make him vulnerable to charges of recklessness. But…

The terrorist attacks made the moral quandaries of the 90’s look like luxuries and restored the old party stereotypes with a vengeance. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans enjoyed an astounding 40-point advantage on the question of which party was best at ”keeping America strong”; the election was understood as a referendum on national security policy, and the G.O.P. swept the board.

The Democrats are, intelligently, trying to reformulate a response. Dean has one, as does Clark. But Clark’s positions are surprising, and raise questions about whether he will be able to directly confront Bush on issues of military policy.

And yet here was the former Supreme Allied Commander positioning himself slightly to Howard Dean’s left. Indeed, the central paradox of Clark’s campaign, which in recent months has neither gained nor lost much altitude, and remains fixed in a flight path well below Dean’s, is that a candidate whose chief virtue was his credibility on national security issues has proved to be such a peacenik. People around Clark disagree as to the source of his surprising politics. One figure who has given Clark substantial advice says that Clark has moved left owing to the ”political dynamic” fostered by Dean. Clark himself says that he’s just angry at the commander in chief’s failure to take responsibility. When Clark and I spoke in November, I said that those of us in the audience at the conference assumed that he believed the Bush administration could have and should have stopped the terrorist attacks — a terrible charge, almost a calumny. No, he said; he meant that the administration had refused to conduct ”an after-action review,” as he would have done. Of course, if that’s what he meant, he could have said so. It seemed, rather, that he had decided to mine the vein that Dean had worked so effectively.

And having done so, will then be presented with the dilemma of selling those views to a general electoral base far less willing to be ‘weak and right’ than ‘strong and wrong’. Clark also has very specific criticisms:

When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 — we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane — he said, ”You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,” thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ”You could then have gone to NATO and said: ‘O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.”’ NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war.

and

Clark argues that the very consensus war-fighting strategy that produces terribly inefficient wars also greatly increases the likelihood of a successful postwar outcome — which is what the whole effort is supposed to be about. ”It’s not where you bomb and what building you blow up that determines the outcome of the war,” Clark said to me. ”That’s what we teach majors in the Air Force to do — make sure you hit the target. It’s the overarching diplomacy, the leverage you bring to bear, what happens afterward on the ground, that gives you your success. And for that you need nations working together.” That, in a nutshell, is the Wesley Clark alternative paradigm of national security.

He’s right in the sense that international consensus, once reached, is a powerful tool for managing the political aftermath of war. But discussing it and doing it are very different things.

Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different — the post-9/11 world. Clark argues persuasively that the NATO ”consensus engine” forces member governments to ”buy into” joint decisions. But what if the French or Germans don’t want to buy into Iraq or, say, to a tough posture should Iran start violating critical nuclear safeguards? A key aspect of the neoconservative argument on terrorism, most associated with the analyst Robert Kagan, is that Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch. Clark’s answer is that if we take the concerns of our allies seriously, they will rally to our side. But they may not; Frenchmen may consider the United States, even under a benign President Clark, a greater threat to world peace than Iraq. It may be that in his years with NATO, Clark so thoroughly absorbed the European perspective that he has trouble recognizing how very deeply, and differently, Americans were affected by 9/11.

This isn’t to suggest that Clark – or any of the Democrats – are without a grounded, coherent perspective in which to place their policies.

In an article last spring in World Policy Journal, Dana H. Allin, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O’Hanlon, foreign-policy thinkers from the conservative side of the Democratic spectrum, proposed a doctrine of ”nationalist liberalism,” which would ”consciously accept the critical importance of power, including military power, in promoting American security, interests and values,” as the neoconservatives had in the 1970’s. But the doctrine would also recognize that America’s great power ”will create resistance and resentment if it is exercised arrogantly and unilaterally, making it harder for the United States to achieve its goals.” The authors laid out a ”generous and compelling vision of global society,” which would include ”humanitarian intervention against genocidal violence; family planning; effective cooperation against global warming and other environmental scourges”; foreign aid; free trade; and large investments to combat AIDS.

All the major Democratic candidates could be considered nationalist liberals. And it’s no surprise: since this is more or less the consensual view of the foreign-policy establishment, practically everybody the candidates have been consulting takes this view. With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did.

What is suggested is something which seems to combine the aggressive military effort of Bush with the humanitarian – and more importantly, the internationalist from an economic, environmental, and postentially political base.

I see a number of issues with this approach, and will touch on several immediately. The first is that I think it unlikely that the world community – which had a stated interest in restraining US power before Iraq – is going to accede to the unfettered use of US military forces as long as we sign Kyoto, offer cheap AIDS drugs, accept the ICC, and agree to spearhead militarily intervention to limit genocide. I don’t think that one buys us the other. Domestically, I see a hard time forging a consensus for the kind of sacrifice that would take – a military large enough to both act on our behalf, and do the world’s bidding at the same time that we harness our economy to benefit the world’s (stipulating for the moment that those actions would in fact benefit the world economy, which is a legitimate subject for debate).

All of this is an airy academic discussion unless the Democrats can either sideline defense as a subject for this election, or demostrate that their warm goodwill for foreign governments can be handcuffed to a ruthless willingness to defend US lives and interests.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: ”Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?” In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn’t. ”Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?” O’Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that ”the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.”

Strong and wrong beats weak and right — that’s the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement.

No kidding.

I’m wrestling with the issue of internationalism a lot these days. My core issues, simply, are that I believe that the EU elites are far more corrupt and self-serving than our own – and I distrust ours. I think that the UN has squandered it’s legitimacy as it dignifies murderous kleptocrats with votes matching those of countries with legitimately chosen (or at least imposed over a long term) governments which have some legitimacy beyond the barrel of a secret policeman’s gun.

This is all great food for thought; sorry to have quoted so extensively, but please go read the whole article and draw your own conclusions.

Gary Farber of Amygdala needs a break – no, he really needs a break.

He’s so far down that he’s looking up to tie his shoes.

Take a look, and if someone can help him out, do it! Here’s his PayPal button.

Note that this isn’t an endorsement of his blog or positions – I asked people to help Arthur Silber a while back, and I’m about to light up his ridiculous latest like a pinanta…but agree or disagree, Gary is definitely one of the good guys. Let’s keep the lights on.

(JK says: Originally posted Dec. 31, 2003 – but see quality blog posts like this one about affairs inside the Saudi kingdom… please help him if you can)

Den Beste has a discursive (is that a pleonasm?) essay up on ‘hive minds’ and their relation to the Internet.

He points out the role of language in human intelligence, but flatly misses, I think, the key point.

The ability to freeze and store knowledge – first in the form of ballads like the Illiad or Ramayana, then in the form of accounting records (Hammurabi’s tablets), then in the form of written work is itself a huge part of both collective and individual human intelligence, and has been for millennia.Try a thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works – a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human?

Part of what makes us human is the fact that each of us stands on the shoulders of giants, to borrow Newton’s phrase. That’s true not only in science and engineering, as Den Beste points out, but in all aspects of human activity – in fact human activity is largely based on taking from and adding to that larger fabric of frozen knowledge.

We live in a hive mind, and each of us internalizes much of it. If you want to see what it looks like, walk into a good library and look around.

That fact is a part of why we address cultures as a whole – why I believe it is the Palestinian culture rather than a few individuals that must be restrained.

It is also why I think that there is hope; because I know that the wild children that have been found managed to become at least somewhat accultured, and that dark and bloody cultures have in the past become docile.

Patterico has a great compilation of the LA Times’ more … god, I need a word here … infuriating … examples of the ‘intellectual rigor and emotional self-discipline‘ we got from the Times this year.

Me, I’ve started to read the SJ Mercury News and the Bee online.

Arthur Silber has a monumentally chestbeating post up on ‘the Coalition of the Pissy‘ and warbloggers.

Since I’m for the war and a blogger, I guess he’d include me in that category. And since I have a deep set of disagreements with him – not just about the war but about some of the broader issues he raises in the post, I’ll take them on here.First, the tired (I’d hoped it was re-tired by now) ‘chickenhawk’ argument:

…the warbloggers, those armchair generals who appear to delight in conflict, war and death — so long as it all occurs far from wherever they happen to be, while their fingers fly over their laptops, while they sip their evening drinks and watch their widescreen TVs in their oh-so-comfortable homes.

Second, the notion that simplisme is the root of the desire for war, and that one who understands the complex, rich broth of history would take a different position:

According to the brave, fearless, always-typing warbloggers, we had spread before us an old-fashioned morality play: on one side, we had pure, untarnished good — the noble, honorable, uncompromising United States, which stands only for truth, justice, freedom and liberty for all. And on the other side, we had a monster like Saddam Hussein — and anyone who expressed a “but” clearly had placed himself on Saddam’s side, and on the side of torture, the murder of innocents, the gassing of children, rape rooms, and innumerable other crimes against humanity. There was no middle ground, no complexity, no nuance here — it was one or the other. You were either on the side of the typing warbloggers and of Pure Good, or allied with the forces of Unadulterated Evil.

Third, the notion that criticism somehow equals censorship:

I also realized something much more important: all those who adopted Coalition of the Pissy as their war whoop of condemnation against anyone declining to join their mindless dance of joy are nothing more than moral bullies and intellectual thugs. They are the enemies of mind, and of thought — and they are the enemies of truth, justice and freedom in a very deep sense. They are the advance guard of the Truth Police. For them, history does not exist, nor does the past in any meaningful sense at all, nor does the future.

These barbarians live only in the moment, only in the now — disconnected from everything that has become before, and from everything that is likely to flow in the future from our present actions. Thought, principles and ideas are alien to them, in the most profound sense imaginable.

Fourth, the notion that it’s really All Our Fault:

And if you want thorough, indeed overwhelming, documentary evidence of the numerous kinds of support provided to Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s by both the United States and Britain, go to this page. Follow the links — and despair, but wonder no more where Saddam’s “power” came from.

But our own crimes and betrayals still continued. Not only did we build up a man we knew to be a vicious, brutal dictator when it suited the demands of an utterly pragmatic, unprincipled foreign policy — a policy which many enthusiastic supporters of our current foreign policy now want to see continued with Taiwan, so that we can sell yet another free country down the river for the benefit of a totalitarian dictatorship — but we then stood by while innocents were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. The following has to be one of the blackest marks in our recent history — and one of the most damning indictments of a “pragmatic” foreign policy, a policy which deliberately and intentionally spits in the face of principles, and of the value of human life.

Fifth, the notion that having done something wrong in the past, we can’t right it.

…these people who proclaim their own moral superiority at every turn, and condemn those who do not agree with them in every detail as loathsome “Saddam-lovers” who “hate America” — apparently never learned, or are now determined to forget, that it was the United States, Britain and other Western nations who built up and supported Saddam when it suited our purposes, and that it was the United States that stood by while courageous Iraqis were slaughtered literally under our noses.

Sixth, the overweening moral arrogance that seems to characterize a big part of the antiwar movement.

I want to state one thing very clearly and unmistakably for the benefit of any warbloggers who might read this — particularly those warbloggers and other hawks who strut their self-announced moral superiority and constantly shove it in the face of everyone else, and who act as if any disagreement with their historically ignorant views of the world constitutes some sort of treason. You are the enemies of America — just as you are the enemies of thought, of history, of ideas, of any conception of what genuine liberty means, and how it is to be achieved.

Let’s go through these in order.

First, I’ve hammered a nail in the chickenhawk argument before; I should try again with a wooden stake. It’s a vile debate tactic, aimed as silencing those with whom you disagree, and intellectually senseless, as it would suggest that only the troops ought to vote on issues involving war – something that I hope we’re pretty far away from in this country.

Second, no, the issue isn’t the acceptance of nuance, but the inability to see anything in the other side’s facts or argument that can simply be accepted – as it makes sense to accept that Saddam’s capture was good – without a left-handed attempt to devalue it.Again, it’s about devaluing an opponent’s arguments so that no real weighing can take place. I fully accept the idea that war is a bad thing – that innocents (and innocence) die; that events seldom play out according to plan; that plans themselves are incomplete and contingent.

I’m just weighing the scales differently, and am willing to accede both the goodwill and intellectual probity of those who disagree with me. Doesn’t mean I don’t think they aren’t wrong; people often are.

But I don’t need to deny the idea that deaths in combat – of our troops, civilians, or even our enemies – are tragic, or that lives are in fact shattered by loss and injury in wartime. And I can hold that thought without the balancing ‘but’ and still hold on to my belief that those tragedies and losses are sometimes necessary or unavoidable. In my universe, that’s what qualifies a nuance and intellectual sophistication.

Third, no, saying that you’re wrong – even loudly saying that you’re wrong – isn’t censorship, it isn’t something that makes us ‘enemies of truth, justice and freedom‘ – unless, of course, you are the sole arbiter of truth, justice, and freedom (see arrogance, below). I’m tired of reading in the Los Angeles Times plaints from those who explain that their dissent is being crushed by the totalitarian State. If the State was crushing your dissent, you wouldn’t be on page A3 of the Times, you’d be in Pelican Bay. that ought to be a difference we can all understand.

Fourth, where does the notion that all of history is driven by the Trilateral Commission (or, more seriously, by the U.S.) come from? Everything isn’t our fault, nor is it entirely our responsibility.

The West, collectively, has both some responsibility for what happens in the Middle East, and some stake in how it comes out. That stake was raised dramatically on 9/11 – as it would have been had we watched a cloud of debris, dust, and human ash rain down over Paris rather than Manhattan.

But to suggest that we – in the U.S., or even in the West in its entirety are the only actors in this drama – is both counterfactual and morally demeaning to the actual people who live in those far away lands. They have the status of actors, of moral agents, not props in some morality play being acted out among the intellectuals here in California.

Fifth, our failure to march on Baghdad and to support the Sunni uprising was a stupid and immoral act. But I’ll point out that it was many of the same actors in Europe and the UN who counseled that we limit our action to ejecting Saddam from Kuwait. And having failed to do the right thing once precludes us from doing the right thing later – how?

Sixth, I certainly reserve the right to enthusiastically argue on behalf of what I believe in. But I make those arguments in the context of my belief that the rest of the universe is full of smart, well-informed people who are worth listening to. And that not only do I hope they I can convince them of things important to me, but that it just may be that I learn something from them.

Because if I can’t learn from other people – if my only lessons come from self-reflection and dialogs held with my mirror – there wouldn’t be any point in public dialog, and I could save myself the effort of typing these words for public consumption.

UPDATE: Demosophia comments, and adds some historical echoes from an earlier era.

Instapundit takes a strong stand on the Palestinian issue, based in no small part on the post below detailing Palestinian hatred and anti-Americanism.

I came out against the immediate creation of a Palestinian state over a year ago because I don’t think the social and political materials for a state are there yet, and because I don’t think we should reward people who talk about peace in English and war in Arabic.

…but…Glenn thinks that the Palestinian people are part of a proxy war against Israel and the U.S., and that by attempting to be ‘evenhanded,’ we’re misleading ourselves. His concrete proposals are pretty reasonable:

I don’t think this means that the Bush Administration should be taking direction action against them — closing off their funding via shutting down Saddam is a good start, and a policy of slow strangulation directed at Arafat and his fellow terrorists is probably the most politic at the moment. We need to try to squeeze off the EU funding, too, especially now that it’s been admitted to be part of a proxy war by the EU not just against Israel, but America.

But let’s stop pretending that what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians is some sort of family misunderstanding. It’s war, and the Palestinians — and their EU supporters — think it’s a war not just against Israel, but against us. We should tailor our approach accordingly.

But I still think he’s is wrong in this – wrong because I tend to think that while a bloodthirsty cult run by kleptocrats does dominate the Palestinian people today, I continue to believe (based on not much more than optimism and my own view of human nature) that this dominance doesn’t have to last. This implies that the issue is the leadership and dominant culture, and that the average Palestinian hasn’t completely internalized the values of that homicidal leadership; or rather that it is best to proceed as though that’s the case.

That’s a subtle but crucial distinction. It implies that we can be, in the terms of the Marines, both the “best friend and worst enemy” to the Palestinian people, and it builds a door that reasonable Palestinians can follow should they choose to.

Making that choice possible should be the goal of our policies in that area.

The paths are twofold; to openly go to war with the Palestinians (and in doing so, ultimately with the Arab world), or break the problem apart by doing several things: dry up the political and financial incentives being offered the Palestinians and terrorists to fight rather than simply live; find and neutralize the committed fighters; and work to empower (initially by keeping them from being killed by the more radical elements) the majority who I have to believe simply want to raise kinds and lead normal lives.

Note that none of what I’m proposing is easy. And that elements of it do involve the explicit use of force – against terrorist organizations operating in the Occupied territories and judiciously, against states that harbor or sponsor them.

But I think that it’s easier to try the complex solution before we simply sweep the table clean with a war.

Look, so far the Arab states have made it clear that they will fight the war against Israel to the last Palestinian. They have gotten a free ride in that they can send relatively insignificant amounts of cash and aid and so at a low cost have a lot of impact on Israel.

Our goals should be in part to end that free ride, and free the Palestinians from their role – as Glenn describes it – as cannon fodder in order to let them make a conscious choice about whether they want war or peace.

I won’t foreclose on the latter possibility until it’s clear that the Palestinian people have.